Today I’d like to talk a bit about a conversation of sorts that happened recently between Cory Doctorow and tante (from Smashing Frames). Actually it’s not really about the conversation, although I do recommend it (there are four articles: 1, 2, 3 and 4), but rather its subject.
The topic at hand is, again, AI. And more specifically the following question: should we accept its usage at all? Or do we have some kind of moral obligation to avoid it AI at all costs, given the very real and documented harms it caused and is still causing today? And if that’s the case, then what about all the people around us who do make use of it?
I obviously won’t even pretend to cover all of this perfectly by myself, but this subject has got me thinking for a while, so I thought I might as well lay it down properly.
AI is bad, obviously
It should really go without saying, at this point, that AI (specifically generative AI) has done a lot of harm. I’ve written about it before, as did many smarter and more eloquent people. AI uses a lot of water and energy, is dependent on underpaid work from poor countries, can reinforce biases or be responsible for cognitive harms, etc. etc. (see this site for a quick rundown).
But our smartphones and computers and their apps also use water and energy for their production while depending on underpaid work that can be outright modern day slavery, something we have known for a long time. Are any of those apps worth abetting slavery and child labour? Is this a conversation we want to have? Because I don’t, and nothing is worth that. Yet I own a smartphone and a computer, like probably most people reading this.
So why is AI different? The easy answer is: because it’s useless. But that’s not entirely true, since a lot of people do find personal uses for it. Not things that were completely impossible before of course, but then again people did pretty well before smartphones existed! The fact that we can’t easily imagine our lives without them isn’t so much progress as it is a damning indictment of our overreliance on a technology that’s younger than most people alive1.
A slightly better answer, I think, is that AI pissed everyone off. It is at best a half-functionning technology peddled by pathologic liars and illuminated boosters who’ve been insisting for years now that “next model will be AGI”. Add to that the massive plagiarism, constant slop and fearmongering about AI replacing jobs, and it becomes honestly really hard to not be pissed. And fair enough, I’m pissed too! I hate OpenAI and Sam Altman, I hate Anthropic and Dario Amodei, and I have nothing but contempt for the sad sad people competing on leaderboards to see who will burn the most tokens.
But however pissed I may be, scolding and policing people around me who use any amount of AI is not a good — or viable — answer.
But that doesn’t mean using it is always bad
All of the above being said, let’s not fall into the “people who participate in something are bad and banned from trying to make it better” trap (see Mister Gotcha for a funnier version). Generative AI is a highly flawed technology that deserves utmost criticism, but this is more or less true of a lot of other things, and we still use those other things. So why not use AI?
As long as you are using it in a personal manner, without contributing in any way to the hype or enriching the ploutocrats, why would it be automatically wrong?
Morally speaking, if you were to judge other human inventions as harshly as AI, you would either have to make exceptions in order to not reject most modern technology. But even if that isn’t enough for you (even though it probably should be)2, I still think it’s a bad strategy, politically speaking.
Think about it: a lot of people might simply not be as informed as you are about AI and the politics of it all. Sure they’re annoyed at the slop or don’t want to use it so much at work, but maybe they see it as just a boring new technology: some people are hyped, some people want to go back to before it existed, and we couldn’t afford it without exploiting poorer countries. What’s new? So maybe they still use it from time to time: hey ChatGPT, can you draw me as a Ghibli character? - Hey Sora, care to generate me slapping my boss? And so what? Are you now so mad at them you’ll just stop talking to them?!
Your relatives and friends are probably the wrong target for your anger, justified as it may be. Alienating them is not helping them (or your cause). Which is not to say you can’t do anything, of course.
So what do we do?
Organize! Or as Cory Doctorow puts it: seize the means of computation!
Like so many people, you can refuse AI. Not by asking your equals to be morally pure and good, and not by simply “shopping carfully” and picking the lesser evil like it’s going to matter. If you want to act3, then speak up! Tell people what you really think about AI, but more importantly show them that you are actually on the same side. That they too can speak out without fear of being shamed by some AI-boosting collegue, or retaliated against by their employer. That you’re doing this because you care about everyone, including them.
Remember where your anger should be directed: towards the clique of con artists and liars who are still, to this day, gaslighting everyone they can about the supposed “miracle of AI”. This isn’t even their first scam. And we should Never Forget What They’ve Done.